In the meanwhile, Michael. Lifted through the air, exchanged into
invisible hands that drew him through a narrow diameter of brass into a
lighted room, Michael looked about him in expectancy of Jerry. But
Jerry, at that moment, lay cuddled beside Villa Kennan's sleeping-cot on
the slant deck of the _Ariel_, as that trim craft, the Shortlands astern
and New Guinea dead ahead, heeled her scuppers a-whisper and garrulous to
the sea-welter alongside as she logged her eleven knots under the press
of the freshening trades. Instead of Jerry, from whom he had last parted
on board a boat, Michael saw Kwaque.

Kwaque? Well, Kwaque was Kwaque, an individual, more unlike all other
men than most men are unlike one another. No queerer estray ever drifted
along the stream of life. Seventeen years old he was, as men measure
time; but a century was measured in his lean-lined face, his wrinkled
forehead, his hollowed temples, and his deep-sunk eyes. From his thin
legs, fragile-looking as windstraws, the bones of which were sheathed in
withered skin with apparently no muscle padding in between--from such
frail stems sprouted the torso of a fat man. The huge and protuberant
stomach was amply supported by wide and massive hips, and the shoulders
were broad as those of a Hercules. But, beheld sidewise, there was no
depth to those shoulders and the top of the chest. Almost, at that part
of his anatomy, he seemed builded in two dimensions. Thin his arms were
as his legs, and, as Michael first beheld him, he had all the seeming of
a big-bellied black spider.

He proceeded to dress, a matter of moments, slipping into duck trousers
and blouse, dirty and frayed from long usage. Two fingers of his left
hand were doubled into a permanent bend, and, to an expert, would have
advertised that he was a leper. Although he belonged to Dag Daughtry